Worcester’s flu pandemic

We are in what some are calling an “epidemic” of influenza. Hospitals in Boston and other cities are coping with crowds of folks who are coughing, sick or nauseous. Several deaths have been reported. Governors and mayors are declaring emergencies. Hospitals are putting up tents to handle the overflow. Quarantines of various sorts are being tried.

Over all this — especially for the medical personnel — hovers a nightmare image from 1918 to 1919, when a flu “pandemic” ravaged the globe in the worst such episode since the Black Death of the Middle Ages.

In 1918, the bodies were piled up like cordwood at Fort Devens.

One way to get a quick read on its devastation is to compare its death toll to that of World War I, the deadliest armed conflict in history, just finishing up in 1918.

About 17 million military people died in World War I, and possibly 10 million civilians. The flu may have killed five times as many. At least one estimate puts the toll at 100 million.

Nothing like that has been recorded, before or since.

In 1918, a few months after it appeared in France, it hit Fort Devens, one of the main centers of the U.S. war effort. On Sept. 1, its barracks were jammed with 45,000 soldiers waiting to be shipped to France. By the end of that month, Fort Devens was a charnel house filled with the dead and dying. Bodies were being carted away. More than 8,000 sick and dying men clogged its hospital, which had a capacity of 2,000. The extra bodies, living and dead, were stashed in halls, corridors and outlying buildings. Doctors were baffled. They had never seen anything like it.

Alarmed by the reports from Massachusetts, U.S. Surgeon General William Gorgas sent four prominent physicians to visit the base and tell him what was going on. They reported their horrified amazement at the sight of “hundreds of stalwart young men coming into the hospital in groups of 10 or more. Their faces soon wear a bluish cast; a distressing cough brings up blood-stained sputum. In the morning the dead bodies are stacked about the morgue like cordwood.”

One witness reported watching a pathologist perform an autopsy. It was a gruesome sight. When the chest was opened, the lungs were revealed to be blue and swollen with foamy surfaces. The pathologist, a Dr. William Welch, remarked, “This must be some kind of new infection — or plague.” He was correct.

After more than 8,000 Spaniards had died from it just in the month of May 1918, it was called the Spanish Flu or sometimes the Purple Death, from the bluish tinge shown on the skin and lungs of the victims.

From Fort Devens the plague spread quickly to Worcester County. By the middle of September, newspapers were reporting its ravages. Leicester reported 125 cases. Eight died in Millbury on one day. Westboro and Holden closed their schools. The Leominster hospital had to turn away people who were dying. On Sept. 15, Worcester Mayor Pehr Holmes ordered fires lighted in all public school furnaces, in an effort to stem the disease. It had little effect.

At the end of September, the Worcester Board of Health essentially shut the city down. “All public, private and parochial schools, all theaters, motion picture houses, all places of amusement, all dance halls and public halls” were to close their doors until Oct. 7. That included the saloons. The churches were already closed after a ruling from the state. The board appealed for extra nurses at City Hospital, which was stretched to the limit and beyond. New graduate nurses were offered $4 a day, experienced nurses $60 a month, doctors $150 a month. At the behest of Mayor Holmes, City Hospital trustees voted to convert the Agricultural Society building in Greendale into an emergency hospital. It was ready within 10 days.

Public school teachers, their classrooms closed, volunteered as nurse assistants. They made beds, changed linens and helped out in various ways. Mrs. Samuel Colton opened her Elm Street mansion to any emergency workers who needed a bed and a bath. Various organizations pitched in. The Catholic Womans Club, the Blessed Sacrament Red Cross Auxiliary, the Zionist Organization of Worcester and several others did what they could during those grim days in October 1918.

A home on Harvard Street was hastily opened to offer help to children made orphans by the plague. The Telegram reported that “immeasurable good” was done in placing bereft tots in the homes of relatives and friends.

When the wave of deaths began to wane, Worcester quickly recovered. Perhaps 1,000 to 2,000 people died in Worcester County, not nearly the toll experienced by other localities.

The 1918 flu epidemic was the worst such plague in modern history. It covered the globe and it was lethally communicable. It far exceeded the various other epidemics, whether yellow fever, smallpox, typhus or malaria.

The United States lost perhaps 675,000 to the Purple Death, a far lower percentage than some other places. Still, it has been estimated that one in every four Americans, including President Woodrow Wilson, were infected to some degree.

Few Americans remember the 1918 pandemic, but it is much in the minds of scientists and physicians who are warily watching the current outbreak.